July 14, 2006

Evelyne Viegas, a student in the MSIM program here at UW, is doing an independent study with me this
summer on the semantic Web and collaborative software, and as part of
that, she and I have established a semantic web discussion group that
meets at the Third Place Bookstore (and cafe and pub) every couple of weeks. This is the academy we always dreamed about: books, beer, coffee, and camaraderie. And people come!

First of all, how cool is it that bookstores here provide social
space for community events? Not just a place to buy coffee, but a
space for events. Third Place alludes to the place other than
home and work, where people congregate for sustenance and community.
Is it accident or irony that Amazon, the slayer of independent
bookstores, sits high on a hill overlooking Seattle, home of a vibrant
ecology of independent bookstores?

But i digress. Half a dozen to a dozen would-be and actual
semioticians gather every other week to explore the manifestations of meaning
on the Web, and how to encourage and capitalize on it. Last night's
topics ranged across:

It is certainly among the most popular... in fact, this past week, Marshall Kirkpatrick reports that US visits to MySpace led all other sites for the first time. Yikes!

Finally, the award in the category of If-you-can't-define-it-you-don't-really-know, goes to Kevin O'Halloran, graduate of the the iSchool and currently at Microsoft, who offers the following definition of irony:

a measure of the distance between text and subtext

OK... i think I got it. Finally.

Now... what would MySpace for grownups look like?

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image: Seattle's skyline at night, taken from a pier on Alaska Way on a crisp evening in July

June 19, 2006

My first encounter with Umberto Eco was through Foucault's
Pendulum, which I found a difficult if compelling read. You might think
of FP as the book Dan Brown might have written had he been better-read and less
interested in…well… readers. It is a thinking person’s DaVinci Code… a
very well-read and patient thinking person.

I struggled to keep my head above water, and mostly failed.
Eco is vivid and brilliant. He also, in my view, sometimes edges
toward the pedantic, unable to suppress the semiotic detail that cascades
through what must be tightly integrated academic and novelistic lives (Eco is a
professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, though, that is probably an
understatement equivalent to saying that Bill Clinton is a politician from Arkansas).

The word semiotics is, as far as I understand it, is the philosophy of communication. In FP, the historiography, symbolism, and dramatic narrative were so serpentine as
to overtax my sparse understanding of the two millennia of the history of
Christianity. I couldn't find traction
in the story, though certainly it was a memorable confusion. His latest
novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, is far more accessible to this
casual reader, perhaps because the semiotics is distinctly 20th
century, and in general more familiar.

The book is built around a middle aged man, Yambo, who has lost his personal
memory to a stroke, but retains the public, shared experience of literature and
daily living (I can't say whether this is a common mode of amnesia, but the
device is integral to the book). The narrative describes his search for
his own past, and his rediscovery of his family's history in fascist Italy of the 1930’s
and 40’s.

Much of the book involves the protagonist's reconstruction of self in the
long-closed-up house of his upbringing, where he recovers parts of his
identity, including his intellectual, sexual, and moral coming of age.

Loana uses graphic
devices uncommon in books outside the so-called 'graphic novel' genre. There
are hundreds of color images interspersed in the text. These pictures remind us
why the cover-art of online book catalogs are so important, evoking as they do
our history with content we’ve known, or acting as visual trigger to suggest
expectations in content we don’t. It is a surprisingly engaging device.

Eco has given us a novel of a high intellectual order that explores the
origins of self and morality, and illustrates the importance of personal and
cultural memory, and how bereft of identity we are without both. It is also a good story, well told; I wanted to find out what happens.

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Image: The elevator ride to the Top of the Rock (Rockefeller Center) in New York City. April, 2006, by the author